The short answer to our provocative headline is no. But two other recent headlines got us pondering the question. Yesterday, the New York Times, and on Monday, the Journal of the American Medical Association(JAMA) published, respectively, a story and an opinion piece on the potential downsides to medicine that is aimed at specific genetic profiles.
Read MoreTags: clinical trials, personalized medicine, genetic testing, precision medicine
[A disclaimer: you probably won’t want to read this post while having lunch at your desk.]
Read MoreTags: genetic testing, GINA
Last week, the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST,) working through the Genome in a Bottle Consortium (GIABC) (a NIST-funded and initiated working group) pushed next generation sequencing (NGS) a little closer to being adopted into regular clinical practice. NIST/GIABC have released a standard for measuring the accuracy of genetic tests.
Read MoreTags: personalized medicine, map of biomedicine, genetic testing, NGS Sequencing
It's no secret that we human beings will go to great lengths to keep our families safe and healthy. In the late 1940s, Dr. Robert Guthrie, a cancer doctor, learned that his son, John had mental retardation. About a decade later, after switching his focus to finding the causes of mental retardation, Dr. Guthrie's niece was born with phenylketonuria (PKU), a genetic disorder that prevents the body from metabolizing the amino acid phenylalanine. Untreated, PKU can lead to mental retardation.
Tags: genetic testing, 5AM, newborn screening
Admittedly, I am a bit behind in my journals, so I only recently read articles in Nature entitled Secrets of the Human Genome Disclosed and Genomes on Prescription. The first article was about geneticist Ghoulson Lyon, who presented a research study at a conference on a family suffering from an unknown, apparently genetic, disease. He was trying to find genetic variants associated with the disease, which caused some male children in the family to die before they reached their first birthday.
Tags: genomics tools, genomic data, genetic testing, human genome, genetic mutation
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